Dehydrating Apples, Bananas & Limes

I have a feeling that I’m going to have a side-site called “will it dehydrate”. Because I’m dehydrating anything I can get my hands on…

Last night (er… into this morning) I dehydrated Apples, Bananas & Limes – basically what was left in my fruit basket…

I read in my book to cut the bananas 1/8″ think slices. So I set my mandolin to 1/8″, but I found that slicing this thin produced very brittle slices for bananas, so I turned it up 2 notches…so somewhere between 1/8″ & 1/4″ and sliced an additional 4 bananas at this setting without much of an issue.

Next, I sliced the Apples at the same thickness. I used Gala Apples because they are a very sweet apple, but can be slightly more expensive, but in my opinion, it’s worth the trade off. I also did not peel my apples, but left the skin on them. Since slicing the apples was easily achieved with the mandolin, There wasn’t really a reason to de-seed the apples, as the seeds fell right out. I however, did remove some of the remaining pits using a boba straw ( larger diameter straws used for drinking boba tea. Can usually be found at the Asian market) to remove the pits and the remaining areas of the stem (see photos below)

Apple before removal

“jamming” the straw down over the pit

nice clean and quik pit removal

for larger area I hit the apple a couple of times with the straw.

Lastly, I sliced the limes. Some people on the Internet mentioned that when they dried their limes they became very dark – nearly brown in color. They also cut theirs at 1/4″ thick. However, I , keeping with the other items I had, used the setting I used for everything else in this batch.

I laid out all the slices on the the mesh insert, set the temp to 135 degrees & timer for 11 hours.

At about 4 hours, the limes sill had a good amount of color in them and probably could have gone for a couple more hours and could’ve been done. But instead I let them continue with the rest of the batch. I’ll have to try it again and see how they are after 5-6 hours. Everything else needed to continue.

When the unit finally shut off, I pulled out the bananas, they were stuck to the sheet, but were easily removable. The apples slid off without an issue as did the limes.

Bananas dried for 11 hours at 135 degrees.

Gala Apples dried for 11 hours at 135 degrees.

Limes dried for 11 hours at 135 degrees.

In the photo, you’ll notice that the limes did end up discoloring slightly, but not as bad as some I have seen on the Internet. The Bananas aren’t as crunchy as I had hoped, they are a little chewy, but I’m okay with that. I might look into increasing the temp next time on a batch of bananas. The Apples are awesome! They are initially chewy when you bite into them, bu they almost immediately begin to melt in your mouth and they are very sweet. Limes…well, they taste like limes… I might look into reconstituting them in water and seeing if I can make some type of limeade with them.